Frustrating experience with AWS Beanstalk

I have used Azure's Paas services before. For a friend's website, I was trying out AWS's Paas offering today. The experience is nothing less than just frustrating. I have a fully functioning rails application. It is working fine locally. However, when I tried to upload the application using the beanstalk command line, I am seeing the following error.

ERROR: [Instance: i-002808929ac3e534b] Command failed on instance. Return code: 1 Output: (TRUNCATED)...SyntaxError: Invalid CSS after "": expected selector or at-rule, was "{"
(sass):1
/opt/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/bundle:23:in `load'
/opt/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/bundle:23:in `

'
Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile
(See full trace by running task with --trace).
Hook /opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/pre/11_asset_compilation.sh failed. For more detail, check /var/log/eb-activity.log using console or EB CLI.

Now the complete log is not available here. You need to log into the instance and check it. However, as the lines show, it is a problem with asset pre-compilation. I tried running asset compilation locally; but I do not see this error. Interestingly, the instance created by the CLI did not allow permission for SSH. It's acceptable source was set to some other IP. It seems to me they launched their product in a hurry.

Invoke a rake task multiple times from another

To invoke a rake task within another, one can do the following:

Rake::Task['namespace:task_name'].invoke

However, if you need to run a task multiple times, the following will not work.

n.times do
    Rake::Task['namespace:task_name'].invoke
end

It only executes the task once. This behaviour is useful when you are loading dependent tasks. For example, if there are two tasks that depend upon :environment task, this behaviour ensures :environment is loaded only once. However, the above code is written with a different intension. To make it work correctly, the rake task has to be re-enabled. The way to do it is as follows:

n.times do
    task = Rake::Task['namespace:task_name'].invoke
    task.reenable
    task.invoke
end

Gem installation fails due to packaged gems

Rake 0.9.6 comes bundled with ruby 2. However, I needed to build ruby-debug-ide 0.4.17.beta16 against rake 0.8.7. I tried uninstalling rake 0.9.6 but there is no way to do it. Using the following command does not list 0.9.6 as an option.

gem uninstall rake

So, now I had to find a way to tell the gem utility to use rake 0.8.7 instead of 0.9.6. A little reading showed that setting the RAKE environment variable could do this.

RAKE=/usr/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/rake-0.8.7/bin/rake gem install ruby-debug-ide -v 0.4.17.beta16 --pre

The above  did not work for some reason. After that I tried the following and it worked.

RAKE=`bundle exec rake` gem install ruby-debug-ide -v 0.4.17.beta16 --pre